Using Willpower Is A Leading Indicator Of Failure

Against instrumental suffering

When I was lurking r/gamedev back in the day, there was a weird little piece of advice that appeared with surprising regularity: “Don’t start with your dream project. Make Pong first. Then make Tetris. Polish it to a shine so that you know what it’s truly like to run even a small project. Then maybe you can work up to the thing you actually want to build.”

This always struck me as insane.

The implicit model is something like: “You need to learn the fundamentals, and Pong teaches fundamentals, and your motivation to make games is a stable resource that will persist through the learning process.” But your motivation to make games (or, really, do anything worthwhile) is not a stable resource. For most people it’s a flickering candle in a drafty room, and the way to keep it lit is to shield it, not to point a fan at it and wait to see if it sputters out.

Do you know what happens when you tell a 19-year-old who wants to make an RPG to make Pong instead? They make 40% of Pong. Then they wander off and do something else with their lives. The Pong-first advice pattern-matches to wisdom—it has the vibe of wisdom, the classic “eat your vegetables before dessert” shape—but it optimizes for the wrong thing. It optimizes for school-like graduated difficulty rather than for keeping the person in the game long enough to learn anything.

Here’s my thesis: if you are regularly relying on willpower to get something done, you now have a problem. Willpower is not a muscle you strengthen through use. Willpower is a strictly-limited emergency resource, and if you find yourself needing it consistently to get your shit done, the correct response is not “develop more willpower” but “figure out why your system requires you to do a bunch of tedious or aversive bullshit and fix that.”

The Shape of the Error

The Pong-first advice shares a structure with a bunch of other bad advice floating around in self-improvement spaces:

Gym culture insists that barbell compounds are superior to machines because they recruit stabilizer muscles and are more “functional.” And this is true, in the sense that if you perform a barbell squat with perfect form you will get a better training stimulus than the leg press. What’s left out is that the barbell squat has a bunch of annoying properties—you have to load and unload plates, you can pin yourself if you fail, the movement pattern is technically demanding, you need a rack—and for me these properties add up to “I will find excuses not to go to the gym.” The machine is worse per rep but I’ll actually do the reps.

Dating coach culture (I know whereof I speak) pushes cold approach as an exposure therapy tool: go talk to strangers until it stops being scary. The claim is that the fear will extinguish with enough repetitions. But cold approach is aversive, often deeply so, and the prescription is essentially “keep doing this aversive thing until it becomes non-aversive, and we can’t tell you how long that will take, and if you quit before it happens that just means you didn’t do enough reps.”

Diet culture loves to point out that weight loss is simple thermodynamics: eat fewer calories than you burn. The Physics Diet! Guaranteed to work if you do it! Which leaves out, of course, that ignoring your body’s demands for food is utterly miserable and humans empirically will not tolerate indefinite misery when relief is a few steps away. The advice is technically correct and practically useless, and when people fail, the failure gets attributed to insufficient willpower rather than to the advice being bad.

You see the pattern: an activity is prescribed on the basis of its theoretical merits while ignoring that it kinda sucks to do, and when people bounce off it the failure is attributed to insufficient willpower. The advice-giver never has to question whether the advice was good because there’s always an escape hatch: “you just didn’t want it enough! This would have worked if you’d just Done The Thing.”

Advice which can never fail, only ever be failed, is bad advice.

The Other Failure Mode

The willpower evangelists are worried about one failure mode: you quit. And yes, most people quit. That’s the most common outcome when you ask someone to sustain an aversive activity indefinitely on the promise of future payoff.

But there’s a more important failure mode, actually.

You succeed at coercing yourself through something with poor returns and/or where the activity is damaging you.

High School Aaron was made of grindset. I simply figured that life was a series of sucky but mandatory activities, and eventually—I had faith—the activities would stop sucking. From this logic I majored in chemistry in college; it was the subject I was by far the worst at, mostly because of the labwork in which I would have recurring panic attacks. (Why chemistry? Identity reasons, mostly. I wanted to be a scientist, and chemistry felt science-y.)

I scraped by just barely well enough to get into a PhD program. And then, blessedly, I was bad enough in the lab that my advisor—a petite, quiet woman with an English accent—sent me an email after a few months suggesting I do something else with my career.

I felt a lot of conflicting emotions at that moment as I stared at my laptop screen. I cried a bit. But the dominant emotion I felt was relief. At last! I could stop torturing myself with this horrible field of study!

The field I pivoted into (programming) I did for love. And it turned out to provide a much better living, and because I liked it I was far, far better at it than I ever was at chemistry. Also I have now witnessed from the inside what it feels like to be extremely good at a job AND extremely bad at one, which is fun.

I knew a guy in TAM who was also a willpower machine. He did months of cold approaching, many times a week, dozens of approaches per month. I think he mostly hated it (I don’t believe he ever got particularly good at the skill), but he didn’t quit. He white-knuckled his way through it exactly as prescribed in a continuous cycle of suffering → burnout → guilt over burnout → resolution to continue suffering. We lost contact, but I think even today he continues pushing that boulder up the mountain. This is a brutal failure state.

People Who Use Willpower To Do Stuff Are 1/10 As Productive As People With Actual Motivation

When I was at Microsoft, the teams reorg’d a whole bunch. Pre-reorg, I was in a team where I was a happy and trusted contributor being provided achievable projects, which I would accomplish, and where the team liked and trusted me. I was extremely productive.

Post-reorg that was no longer true! I acquired a management chain in this reorg that neither liked nor trusted my team, and I personally was assigned to a death march project which was clearly a death march going in but which I was unable to avoid.

(I was given the Microsoft version of a PIP about a week before I quit, and hilariously the PIP included as separate, unrelated items “employee refused during project planning to commit to reasonable deadlines” and, later in the doc, “several important deadlines were missed [for that same project].”)

Anyway, it’s amazing how much more tempting doomscrolling Twitter is when you’ve stopped enjoying the work. My last couple of days before leaving I remember staring at my laptop early in the morning trying to summon the willpower to open it up and see what fresh complaints awaited from my manager. I was not especially proud of my work during this period; I have, at different points of my career, been a 10x and a 1x engineer and I think the main difference between these times was whether my work had any kind of rewarding feedback loop.

School-Shaped Learning Doesn’t Work Without Coercion

Schools are legendarily terrible at generating intrinsic motivation.

They are, in fact, so bad at this that they literally have to pay students in a special currency (“grades”) to get any amount of compliance whatsoever. And that currency only works on a subset of the students anyway; the other half correctly identify that it’s money (a friend of mine calls them Ravenclaw Bucks) with no exchange rate to anything they personally care about, which results in the outcomes you would expect.

When adults try to learn something on their own, they instinctively reach for school-shaped structures: lectures, assignments, curricula, exams. Coursera is the apotheosis of this mindset—they imported the entire K-12 educational format wholesale. What they didn’t import was the coercion. No grades that count for anything, no parents threatening to take away your phone, no social consequences for failing.

The ~99% dropout rate is exactly what you’d predict. The format only ever worked because of external enforcement. Remove the enforcement, keep the format, and you get a thing that’s unrewarding to do with no consequences for not doing it.

Of course everyone bails.

How To Properly Engineer A Reward Structure

When I started learning salsa, I realized very quickly that “get enjoyment from dancing well” was not on the menu in any reasonable timeframe. The skill gap between me and competent dancers was enormous. If I waited to enjoy dancing until I was good at dancing, I would quit long before I got there.

So I had to find other reward sources:

• Social connection: I made sure I liked the people at the studio. The social reward of showing up was independent of how well I danced.

• Visible progression: I used a lot of private lessons, specifically to generate the experience of rapid improvement. I wanted to know FOR A FACT that in week N I was noticeably better than in week N-2. The legible evidence of progress was itself a reward.

• A vanity goal: I wanted to get good anomalously fast—faster than anyone in the dance community was used to seeing. This gave me something concrete to chase that didn’t depend on enjoying the dancing itself or even being particularly good— I wanted “holy shit you’ve only been dancing for X months?” (I am vain. I admit this.)

• A female private lesson instructor who I also like: I don’t much like dancing with men, and the person I choose as a private instructor I’m going to be spending a lot of time with. The lessons need to be fun or else I’ll burn out.

The core of it was just recognizing that the thing I actually wanted had a long bootstrap period, and deliberately engineering an intermediate reward structure that would carry me through it.

The Salsafied G.K. Chesterton Incident

Because I don’t speak Spanish, I found most salsa music unengaging to practice to. The lyrics were just sounds. So I used Suno to generate salsafied versions of old poetry (Lepanto by GK Chesterton is an absolute banger) and practiced to those instead.

One day my salsa instructor walked in on me doing this. Her response: “FOR A LARGE NUMBER OF REASONS YOU NEED TO DANCE TO ACTUAL SALSA.”

And I understood her objection, theoretically. Real salsa music has some rhythmic structures and conventions that the AI-generated stuff still doesn’t capture correctly. Plus, practicing to real music means you recognize the stuff you hear in socials. If you optimize for improvement per practice-hour, real music is clearly better.

But I’m not optimizing for improvement per practice-hour. I’m optimizing for practice-hours-that-actually-happen × improvement-per-practice-hour.

My instructor was focused entirely on the second term. She was treating the first term—whether I actually practice—as fixed, as a willpower problem, as someone else’s department. But the first term is the bottleneck. And if weird AI poetry salsa made the difference between practicing and not practicing, then weird AI poetry salsa is optimal.

This is the same error everywhere:

• Barbells are better per rep, but reps you skip contribute zero

• Pong teaches gamedev fundamentals if you do it, but abandoned projects teach nothing

• Real salsa music is better per session, but sessions you skip don’t count

Traditional pedagogy optimizes for improvement-per-unit-effort and treats the amount of effort as a willpower problem— as a moral failing that the student needs to correct. But for most people, “amount of effort I am willing to devote to this” is the actual bottleneck. And the correct response is to engineer around it.

Conclusion

If you find yourself reaching for willpower (obvious tell: “I really should do X but I’m not”), that’s a diagnostic signal.

Ask:

• Can I remove the aversive parts of this activity without sacrificing the goal?

• Can I construct supplementary rewards that will sustain me until the natural rewards come online?

• Can I restructure the work so it generates visible progress earlier?

• Is there a version of this that I’d actually look forward to, even if it’s theoretically suboptimal?

• Can I make this a social thing with people I like?

• Can I roll this into a project I can take real pride in at parties, not later when I’m “done” but, like, next week?

And if the answer to all of these is “no,” ask:

• Is this a purely instrumental activity I could just drop in favor of a totally different activity that serves the same functional purpose in my life? (Goal Factoring, your friend and mine.)

• What would happen if I just... didn’t do this?

Sometimes the answer is “I would get fired from my job, which pays me money.” Which is valid.

Sometimes the answer is that you’ve been trying to willpower your way toward something you don’t actually want; you just want to want it. (Chemistry, for me, was this.)

But if it’s truly a goal that withstands introspection, try really hard to figure out what a sustainable version of it would look like that you don’t have to coerce yourself into performing.

Grinding only works until it doesn’t.